Jerusalem News (19 August, 2014, 23 Av, 5774)
Contents:
1. Israel's Disproportionate Decency
By Noah Beck
2. Israel Faced A Huge Wave Of Cyber Attacks During Its War With Hamas - And Iran Could Be The Reason Why
by Armin Rosen
3. Map of ISIS Expansion
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1. Israel's Disproportionate Decency
By Noah Beck (forwarded by Obadyah)
August 13, 2014 @ 12:45 am
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/noah-beck/israels-disproportionate-decency
Extracts:
...the evidence shows that Israel has acted with disproportionate decency while Hamas has committed war crimes.
Hamas indiscriminate rocket and missile attacks - which now total about 3,500 in the last month, target primarily Israeli civilians. The effects of Hamas' attacks have been serious (contrary to what most media reports suggest):
a) increasing premature births,
b) shutting down Israel's biggest airport, blocking 90 percent of incoming and outgoing passengers,
c) forcing about 8 million people to live on the edge 24/7, fearing that if their missile defense system or scramble to shelters falters, they could die,
d) constant interruptions throughout the day and night, with as little as ten seconds to find shelter,
e) billions of dollars in economic damage.
The principle of distinction requires belligerents to distinguish between combatants and civilians. Hamas violations of this principle amount to a double war crime: first by targeting Israeli civilians, and second by using Gazan civilians as human shields for these attacks, thereby making it much harder for the IDF military response to distinguish Gazan combatants from noncombatants. Hamas exhorts Gazans to act as human shields and its combat manual encourages this war crime while admitting that Israel avoids civilian casualties - an avoidance that Hamas exploits for tactical advantage. Alan Dershowitz deftly highlights yet another proof of Hamas war crimes: Hamas chooses to locate its military efforts in the most densely populated parts of Gaza, instead of in the far less populated areas nearby, Â a decision calculated to maximize Gazan civilian deaths.
As of August 9, Israel's military has attacked about 5,000 targets in Gaza (4,762 during the first 29 days of Operation Protective Edge and a few hundred since) resulting in 1,915 deaths (according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health). Even if this total were accurate and represented entirely civilian deaths, the strike-to-kill ratio absurdly implies that Israel's military needs about 2.5 attacks to kill one person. But if Israel's goal were just to kill Gazans, it could kill well over 1,915 with a single airstrike. Why spend so much on intelligence gathering and precision-guided bombs (or force Israeli citizens to endure so many costly weeks of war) when the IDF could raze half of Gaza in an hour?
The fact that the IDF has struck so many times with so few casualties shows the extent of its restraint and precision while destroying the terrorist infrastructure threatening Israelis.
Israel has made extraordinary efforts to minimize civilian casualties, Â despitee Hamas' plan to maximize them. Israel aborts airstrikes that will result in excessive civilian casualties, warns civilians to clear areas that will be targeted, and loses ground troops in densely populated areas like Shejaiya to avoid airstrikes that would kill far more Gaza civilians. Israel chose not to target Gaza City's main Shifa Hospital, even though it knew that Hamas leaders were cynically hiding there and an airstrike could have substantially harmed Hamas' military leadership.
Some of the same media outlets that rushed to portray Israel as using disproportionate force have belatedly acknowledged that fighting-age men are vastly overrepresented among Gaza's dead, strengthening Israel's claims all along that it has done its best to target combatants and avoid civilians.
Israel's restraint is all the more remarkable given the genocidal intent of its enemy, as clearly stated in the preamble to Hamas' covenant and demonstrated by Hamas genocidal missile attacks on Israel's nuclear reactor...
The knee-jerk assumption that Israel uses disproportionate force oversimplifiescomplex situations requiring deeper analysis and overlooks the powerful factors limiting Israel's military: 1) internally, Israeli democracy subjects leaders to checks and balances from a vigorous political opposition, independent investigations (like the Winograd Commission), and a defiantly free press and protest culture (including anti-war protests in Tel-aviv); so whenabout 90% of a normally fractious democracy supports military action, the country clearly faces very serious and legitimate threats; 2) externally, the military actions of Israel are more scrutinized than those of any other country (as Bret Stephens brilliantly highlighted in 2009), and therefore always carry a greater risk of war crimes accusations, anti-Semitic attacks abroad, and unprovoked attacks from neighboring countries (over a dozen rockets were fired at Israel from Lebanon during the current conflict in Gaza). Such realities compel Israel to use force judiciously.
In the end, Israel must protect its citizens from an Iran-backed terrorist army that is disproportionately willing to kill Israeli and Gazan civilians, while facing disproportionate blame despite Israel's disproportionate efforts to defend its population more humanely than any state in history has. Only if Israel decisively defeats Hamas can real peace come to Gaza, Â one more reason too let Israel's soldiers finish the job, before granting them the Nobel Peace Prize.
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2. Israel Faced A Huge Wave Of Cyber Attacks During Its War With Hamas - And Iran Could Be The Reason Why
by Armin Rosen
Aug. 18, 2014,
http://www.businessinsider.com/israel-faced-a-wave-of-cyber-attacks-2014-8
Extracts:
Experts say that during Operation Pillar of Defense, Israeli websites faced a larger, more coordinated, and more skilled series of cyber attacks than during similar conflicts. At the same time Hamas was trading fire with the Israel Defense Forces, hackers from all over the world launched a string of attacks on electronic targets in Israel.
According to Gadi Aviran, CEO of the Netanya-based open-source intelligence analysis firm SenseCy/Terrogence, hackers have used the last two Israeli military operations in Gaza as an opportunity to strike at the country. But this time their efforts revealed a greater level of capability and expertise.
"It was much more profound than previous operations," Aviran told Business Insider. "It was well-organized, had a lot of traction, and it used some more advanced techniques than we saw before. It was kind of a logical step in their evolution."
This meant a greater frequency of typically unsuccessful or short-lived acts of web vandalism, like the replacement of a web page with a picture of Adolf Hitler or Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, or attempted data bombs or denial of service attacks. But hackers did manage to overwhelm and slow down a major Israeli internet service provider - a nearly unprecedented accomplishment.
In total, 2,500 websites were defaced during the attacks, while "several databases were leaked online," SenseCy analyst Zahavi wrote.
China-based hackers reportedly tried to steal information related to the Iron Dome missile interceptor system in 2011 and 2012
Israel's cyber challenges
The vast majority of attacks didn't originate in Gaza or the West Bank. Many came from hundreds or even thousands of miles from Israel's borders, from places like Morocco and Indonesia. But there's one country that seems especially determined to prove its cyber-capabilities against Israel, and Gutman writes that it was likely active during the wave of cyber-attacks that accompanied this past month's hostilities.
Iran built up its cyber-offensive capabilities during the decade of international isolation leading up to the Joint Plan of Action in November of 2013. Today, Israel considers Russia, China, and Iran to be the sources of the most aggressive and worrying attacks against its online and electronic infrastructure.
Most Russian-based attacks are criminal in nature - attempts to steal credit card numbers or bank account information, for instance. China has a broad-based hacking strategy that involves efforts against ostensibly friendly or at least non-hostile countries, as when Chinese-based hackers attempted to steal information about Israel's Iron Dome missile interceptor system in 2011 and 2012.
Iranian-based hacking is different in nature. Unlike Russia or China, the Iranian government is politically and ideologically opposed not just to Israeli policy, but to the country's very existence. Hacking originating in Iran is aimed at directly undermining Israel in a way that Russian or Chinese hacking typically isn't.
The Iranian Regime Ups Its Game
Iran made cyber capabilities a top defense priority after the Stuxnet computer bug, a possible joint project of Israel and the U.S. that infiltrated and sabotaged Iran's nuclear program. The Iranian government realized that its enemies had brought the fight to a new battlefield, and established a dedicated cyber command in 2011.
Gutman suspects an Iranian role in some of the more sophisticated Gaza hacks. And there's a precedent for Iran using online Palestinian front groups as a front for anti-Israel activities. In 2013, SenseCy identified a group called Qods Freedom that claimed to be Palestinian and was responsible for extensive denial of service attacks on Israeli sites in July and August of that year. But their online vandalism included Arabic mistakes that no native speaker would make, using a tileset that SenseCy determined could only have been produced through a Persian-language keyboard. Qods Freedom also used the same "defacement signature" as two Iranian groups.
According to the same report, the Hamas-linked Izz al-Din Al Qassam Cyber Fighters were also a project of the regime in Tehran.
Iranian-based hackers' capability seems to be catching up to their ambitions. In February of 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran-based hackers had so deeply infiltrated Navy and Marine Corps unclassified web systems that it would take four months to fully dislodge them.
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3. Map of ISIS Expansion
http://www.britam.org/isis.jpg
